Asthma: DMP is largely consistent with guidelines

On 22 January 2014 the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) published the results of a literature search for evidence-based clinical practice guidelines on the treatment of people with asthma. The aim of the report is to identify those recommendations from current guidelines of high methodological quality that may be relevant for the planned revision of the disease management programme (DMP). According to the results of the report, there is no compelling need for revision of any part of the DMP. However, IQWiG identified some aspects that could be supplemented and specified.

DMPs are revised regularly

After being commissioned by the Federal Joint Committee (G-BA), IQWiG systematically searched for new guidelines, assessed their methodological quality, and extracted relevant recommendations from these guidelines. In a next step these recommendations were compared with the specifications for the German DMP.

A need for revision may arise if new studies provide new evidence on a disease and its treatment. It is therefore legally specified that a DMP must be revised at regular intervals. It is the Institute's responsibility to firstly identify differences between the guideline recommendations and the DMP. It is then the G-BA's responsibility to examine whether these differences should actually lead to a revision of the DMP.

12 relevant guidelines identified

IQWiG was able to include a total of 12 guidelines in its investigation. Six of these guidelines comprehensively address the care of patients with asthma. The others address specific aspects such as hospital care, occupational asthma or the promotion of asthma control in infants and children.

Only few discrepancies

As IQWiG determined, the recommendations of the current guidelines are largely consistent with the requirements of the DMP; only few discrepancies were found. However, compared with the wording in the DMP directive, most recommendations are more detailed.

Moreover, some guidelines address topics that are not contained in the current directive. For example, the diagnosis of occupational asthma is not addressed and the information is lacking that treatment should be targeted towards asthma control and its results. In addition, the guidelines describe a step-by-step scheme for drug treatment.

Related Stories

On 3 January 2014 the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) published the results of a literature search for evidence-based clinical practice guidelines on the treatment of people with chronic ...

On 3 January 2012, the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) published the results of a literature search for evidence-based clinical practice guidelines on the treatment of people with diabetes ...

The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) published the results of a literature search for evidence-based clinical practice guidelines on the treatment of people with heart failure. The aim of ...

On 10th July 2012, the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) published the results of a literature search for evidence-based guidelines for the treatment of obesity in type 2 diabetes. The aim ...

People with rare diseases have the same right to high-quality health care in line with current medical knowledge as other patients do. However, relevant and reliable clinical studies on rare diseases are often lacking. Among ...

Recommended for you

Researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) have linked a specific protein to the development of post-viral infection asthma, which is the first step in generating a novel type of asthma therapy designed to prevent ...

A team of Inserm researchers from the Cardio-Thoracic Research Centre of Bordeaux (Inserm/University of Bordeaux and Bordeaux University Hospital) has demonstrated the clinical efficacy of gallopamil in 31 ...

Researchers have found a potential new target for treating asthma, according to a study led by researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine at the Anschutz Medical Campus and published in the journal Nature Co ...

Cells lining the intestinal tract form a critical barrier, protecting our bodies from the billions of bacteria living in the gut. Breaches in this barrier are driven largely by a single signaling molecule ...

User comments

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.